This report describes my thesis work conducted within the ComSee (Computers That See) team related to the ISPR axis (ImageS, Perception Systems and Robotics) of Institut Pascal. It was financed by the Vesalis company via a CIFRE (Research Training in Industry Convention) agreement with Institut Pascal and publicly funded by ANRT (National Association of Research and Technology). The thesis was motivated by issues related to automation of video analysis encountered during police investigations. The theoretical research carried out in this thesis is applied to the automatic creation of a photo album summarizing people appearing in a CCTV sequence. Using a face detector, the aim is to group by identity all the faces detected throughout the whole video sequence. As the use of facial recognition techniques in unconstrained environments remains unreliable, we have focused instead on global multi-target tracking based on detections. This type of tracking is relatively recent. It involves an object detector and global processing of the video (as opposed to sequential processing commonly used). This issue has been represented by a Maximum A Posteriori probabilistic model. To find an optimal solution of Maximum A Posteriori formulation, we use a graph-based network flow approach, built upon third-party research. The study concentrates on the definition of inter-detections similarities related to the likelihood term of the model. Multiple similarity metrics based on different clues (time, position in the image, appearance and local movement) were tested. An original method to estimate these similarities was developed to merge these various clues and adjust to the encountered situation. Several experiments were done on challenging but real-world situations which may be gathered from CCTVs. Although the quality of generated albums do not yet satisfy practical use, the detections clustering system developed in this thesis provides a good initial solution. Thanks to the data clustering point of view adopted in this thesis, the proposed detection-based multi-target tracking allows easy transfer to other tracking domains.
